Skip to Content

பகுதி 1

XI. Delight of Existence: The Problem

 We can accept this pure Existence, this Brahman, this Sat as the absolute beginning. We can say too that this is not only a beginning but also end and continent of things. In Brahman there is an inherent self-consciousness. It is inseparable from its being. It throws itself out as a force of movement of consciousness. This is creative of forces, forms and worlds. Assuming we have accepted all the above ideas, yet one question remains. It needs an answer. The question is why should Brahman throw out forces? And why should this force of consciousness create a world of forms? There is one well known answer. They say it is compelled by its own nature of Force to create. It is obliged by its own potentiality of movement and formation to move into forms. This, we have already negatived. It is true it has this potentiality. But it is not compelled by it or limited to it. It is free. It is free to move or remain still. It is free to throw itself into forms or retain its potentiality of form in itself. If so, it indulges its power of movement and formation. The only reason for this indulgence is, it does so for delight. The Vedantis saw this eternal Existence. It is primary and ultimate. It is not merely bare existence. It is not even a conscious existence whose consciousness is crude force or power. It is a conscious existence which is being, which is also bliss. As this is

absolute existence, there can be no nothingness. Nor can there be night of inconscience. No deficiency, no failure of Force, no suffering, no negation of delight can be there. If any of these things are there it would not be absolute. Absoluteness of conscious existence is illimitable bliss of conscious existence. The two are only different names for the same thing. All illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is pure delight. Even our relative humanity has this experience. All dissatisfactions mean a limit, an obstacle. Satisfaction comes from the realisation of something withheld. Surpassing of a limit is joy. Overcoming the obstacle brings delight. This is because our original being is the absolute. It is in full possession of its infinity. It has too illimitable self-consciousness and self-power. It has a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. In proportion to the relative touches upon that self-possession, it touches delight. That is the satisfaction of the relative.

The self-delight of Brahman is not limited by the still, motionless possession of its absolute self-being. Its force of consciousness is capable of throwing itself into forms infinitely. Those forms are produced with endless variation. Its self-delight is capable of movement. That self-delight varies. The delight revels in infinite flux. The flux itself is mutable. All these represent numberless teeming universes. The Play looses forth this infinite movement and variation. It is the variation of this self-delight. The object is to enjoy this delight. The play of Force is creative and extensive.

Sachchidananda is Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. They are not three different aspects, but one having three aspects, triune. Its consciousness has a creative nature. It is a self-expressive Force. It is capable of infinite variation in phenomenon. Its forms are forms of self-conscious being. The forms vary endlessly. Sachchidananda enjoys the delight of that variation. So, there is nothing in our world which is not Sachchidananda. Either they are terms of that existence or terms of that consciousness. Or they are the terms of that delight of being. All the changeable forms we see are forms of that one which is not changing. The one infinite force expresses itself in various finite results. Similarly, we know Sachchidananda is invariable and all-embracing. It is delight of self-existence. All we know on earth are variable self- expressions of that One. The conscious force dwells in everything. The conscious force exists in each thing. A thing we know is what it is by virtue of that conscious force. So also, everything that is there is the delight of existence. It exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight.

This is the ancient Vedantic theory of cosmic origin. The human mind immediately meets with two questions. They are two powerful contradictions. One is an emotional and sensational consciousness of pain. The other is the ethical problem of evil. We say the world is an expression of Sachchidananda. If so, existence is consciousness. We readily admit it. Equally so, existence is self-delight and infinitely. Well, we see pain, grief and suffering. They are universal. How can we explain them? We see this world as a world of suffering. Our theory says it is a world of delight of existence. Therefore it is an error, an exaggeration. It is an error of

 

perspective. We can regard the world without passion. We can try to have an accurate appreciation. That may be our only view. It can be an unemotional understanding. Then, we find, in life pleasure is greater than pain. We can sum up the pleasure of experience. And also sum up pain of experience. We will find the sum of pleasure is greater than the sum of painful experience. In individual cases pain may appear to exceed pleasure. The normal state of our nature is active as well as passive. It is on the surface or underlying. Still they are all pleasurable existences. Pain is not so normal but an exception. It occurs when our normal state is suspended. It overlies the normal state. Pain affects us more intensely than pleasure because pain is occasional. The sum of pleasure for us is the greater experience. The sum of pain is a lesser experience of ours. Man is more affected by the rare experience than by his normal state. The normal experience of pleasure is rarely noticed. We do not treasure it. Pleasure can intensify in an acute form as a wave of happiness. When raised like that, maybe we notice it. Then it becomes a crest of joy or ecstasy. We call it delight. Therefore we seek it. The normal satisfaction of existence is felt as neutral. It is there always, regardless of the event. It needs no particular object. The neutral life gives neither pleasure nor pain. That neutral life is there always as a practical fact. The overpowering instinct of self-preservation is given by that. It is universal. But we never seek it. We have a profit and loss account. Joys are the profit. Pain is the loss. It is a balance sheet of emotions and sensations. The neutral state is never entered into our account. There are positive pleasures. There are positive discomforts and pain. We enter them into the account. Pain affects   us more intensely because it is abnormal to our being. To us, pain is an outrage. It is an offence to our existence. It is against what we seek. We consider pain as an external attack. Here we discuss philosophy. It is not affected by our abnormal experience. The greater or lesser sum does not affect us. Nor does the abnormal experience. Greater or lesser, the mere presence is our question and a problem. If all is Sachchidananda, how can pain exist? Where does suffering come from? This is the real problem. A greater confusion enters when ethics come in. It is a false issue. As God is considered personal, pain becomes a question. When God is considered extra cosmic, this difficulty arises. It is a partial issue.

Sachchidananda is God. He is a conscious Being. He is the author of existence. How can He have created a world in which He inflicts suffering on His creatures, sanctions pain and permits evil? If God is All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem. That way we seem to be saying that God is immoral or non-moral. God then becomes an excellent world-mechanist or a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and Love whom we worship. He then becomes a God of Might. We must submit to His law, or we must propitiate His caprice. If God has invented torture as a means of testing, He is certainly cruel. Or He must be insensible. If we say God is a moral being, He must be inferior to the best of men. We intend to call pain an inevitable result of moral evil. We call it natural punishment. Still, the root problem is not answered. Who created pain? Why

was it created? From where did moral evil arise for it to be punished with pain and suffering? This explanation does not tally with life experience. If we admit the theory of karma and rebirth by which the soul suffers for sins of the previous birth, then it looks all right. Moral evil is mental disease or ignorance. How can mental disease be punished by terrible tortures? Often the punishments are extreme and monstrous. We say God is a personal Deity and is supreme. The law of karma is inescapable. They do not go together. Therefore, Buddha denied God. He admitted no personal God who is free and all-governing. His logic is clear. Buddha said that all personality is a creation of ignorance. Therefore it is subject to karma.

We know God to be all-good and all-loving. Let us examine the position of the extra-cosmic God. He is not Himself the universe. He has created good and evil. His creatures suffer pain and suffering. He is Himself unaffected and stands above. He watches, rules, does His will or does not do His will. He does so for the suffering and struggling world. He allows the world to be driven by a law. He does not help the world. If so, God is not omnipotent, all-loving and all-good. Our assumption raises the difficulty sharply. No theory of extra cosmic moral God can explain evil and suffering. They may use a trick of speech. It will avoid the question and not be satisfactory to us. We must answer it plainly. Or we may justify God in his ways and excuse his shortcomings. That way we will identify God with Satan. Anyway, such a God is not the Vedantic God of Sachchidananda: Vedanta says Sachchidananda is ONE without a second. It is such an existence. All that is, is He. If still there is evil, it is He who bears that evil in his creatures. As He is

embodied in His creatures, He has to suffer it in them. Thus we have modified the problem. Evil and suffering are positive negations of Good and Love. Now the question is different. It is not, how has God created evil and how is He immune to it. The question is, how the ALL-BLISS admitted into itself that which is not Bliss.

Thus, half the moral difficulty disappears. It is a difficulty which is unanswerable. That question can no longer arise. We can say God inflicts cruelty on others, while he is not touched by it. This is true whether God shares man's fate or stands free and aloof. Or we can say God inflicts suffering on himself. Neither position solves the ethical difficulty. It can be raised in another form. The All-Delight is all-good and all-love. How can evil and suffering exist in Sachchidananda. God is not mechanical living. He is a free conscious being. He is free to condemn evil or he can reject evil. Here is a basic flaw. The above is a false position because we apply laws of the part to the whole. Our idea is of good and love. We extend it to All-Delight. If we do so, our conceptions arise from duality and division. Those laws are true in the relation of one creature to another creature. We try to apply them to the One. The One is all. We have to see how the problem appears. We must try to solve it in its original purity. Its basis is unity in difference. Then we can handle the part and explain its development. The relationship of creature with creature is based on division and duality.

Let us thus view the whole. We need not limit ourselves to human difficulty and human development. Then we see that we do not live in an ethical world. Ethics is a product of the human mind.

Man tries to read his own mind in Nature. Trying to evaluate Nature in terms of human ethics is, He says, a willful act. It shows man's obstinacy. It leads to self-confusion. His human self is habit-ridden, limited. Judging Nature from his own point of view is not right. Man has evolved a personality according to his nature. How can it apply to Nature? It cannot give him complete sight. Nor will it help him arrive at self-knowledge or even real knowledge. At best it can only prevent knowledge. Material Nature is not ethical. It is governed by a law. It coordinates fixed habits. It takes no cognizance of good and evil. It notes the force that creates. Another force arranges and preserves. There are forces that destroy. It destroys impartially. Those forces are non-ethical. They act according to a secret Will. That will has a dumb satisfaction. Thus they form themselves or destroy themselves. Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical. It produces that material out of which man evolves. Out of that material the higher animal evolves ethics and the ethical impulse. We do not blame the tiger because it slays and eats its prey. Nor do we blame the storm because it destroys. The fire tortures and kills; but we do not blame it. There is a conscious-force in the storm as well as in the tiger. Nor do they condemn themselves. Blame is the beginning of ethics. So also condemnation, self-blame and self-condemnation. We blame others. But we do not apply the same law to ourselves. That is not true ethics. Some events hurt us. We dislike them and recoil from them. This is because of our ethical standards. These are all emotional impulses in us.

The primary origin of ethics is this emotional dislike of events or people. But this recoil itself is not ethical. The deer fears the

tiger. The strong creature is in a rage against its opponent. Here the individual delight of existence is threatened. Therefore it recoils vitally. As the mind develops, they sublimate themselves into repugnance, dislike and disapproval. Disapproval of what threatens us, we dislike. Other things flatter and satisfy us. We approve of them. Both emotions refine themselves in the mind as evil and good. It is good to oneself or his community. This leads us to the general idea of good and evil. We apply these standards to others, not to ourselves. But, throughout, the fundamental nature of the things remains the same. Man desires self-expression. He likes self-development. The Conscious-Force of existence is in him. He likes its play in himself. It progresses. That is his fundamental delight. Whatever hurts that self-expression, self-development, satisfaction of his progressing self is, for him, evil. Whatever helps, confirms, raises, aggrandizes, ennobles it is his good. The conception of his self-development continues to change, becoming higher and wider. At some point, it begins to exceed his limited personality. It then embraces others to embrace all in its scope.

In other words, ethics is a stage of evolution. There is something common to all stages. It is the urge of Sachchidananda towards self-expression. This urge is first non-ethical. In the animal it is infra-ethical. In the intelligent animal it is even anti-ethical. It permits us to approve of hurt done to others which we disapprove of when done to ourselves. In this respect, man even now is only half-ethical. All below us is infra-ethical. Eventually we may arrive above our level. There it may be supra-ethical. It has no need of ethics. The ethical impulse and attitude is all-important to humanity.

Humanity enjoys a harmony and universality. This is a lower harmony based on inconscience. This harmony is broken up by Life into individual discords. These discords work out a higher harmony and universality. It is based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Once we arrive at that goal we do not need ethics as a means. Ethics is not even possible there. Ethics depends upon human qualities. It needs apparently oppositions to survive. Ethics depends upon them. Now we have reached the final reconciliation. Here those qualities and oppositions naturally dissolve.

Thus the ethical standpoint applies only to one of the three stages. It is a temporary stage. To us, it is an all important passage. It is a passage from one lower universality to another of a higher universality. This law or rule cannot be applied to the total solution of the problem as it is a rule of a part. We can take it as only one element in that solution. Our present outlook is a temporary, half-evolved view. Behind this partial understanding are all the facts of the universe. The whole meaning of the evolution is behind this, presently beyond us. The world has three layers. They are infra-ethical, ethical and supra-ethical. We have to find that which is common to all. Only by doing so can we solve the problem.

The conscious-force of existence develops itself into forms. It seeks delight in that development. That is its satisfaction. It begins with that satisfaction of delight. It is a delight of self-existence. This is normal to it. The conscious force clings to it and makes this delight its base. But, it seeks new forms of itself. In the passage to the higher forms, it meets with pain and suffering. They seem to contradict the fundamental nature of delight. This and this alone is the root problem.

How shall we solve it? We can say Sachchidananda is not the beginning and end of things. We can say Nihil, void, a non-existence is the beginning. That void is an impartial void. It contains all the potentialities, consciousness or non-consciousness, delight or undelight. We try to explain everything but we do not explain anything. We have only listed all. We go to a Nothing. We say this Nothing contains all. It is the most complete opposition of terms. We started with a minor contradiction of delight and pain. Now we meet with a major contradiction. Nihil is a void. There can be no potentialities. If the Nihil is impartial, if it is indeterminate, of all potentialities, it is chaos. Now we say the void contains chaos. We do not explain how. Let us return to our original conception of Sachchidananda. Let us try to seek a complete solution here.

We speak of universal consciousness. It is different from our human consciousness. It is more essential than human consciousness and wider than our waking mentality. Similarly, the universal delight is different from our pleasure and pain. We must note here that the universal delight is more essential and wider than human pleasure. In our life pleasure, joy and delight are occasional. They separate themselves from their more important background of delight. Delight is universal, illimitable. It is also self-existent. It is NOT dependent on particular circumstances or causes. It is its own background. Pleasure as well as pain issue out of this background. The delight of being moves to become the delight of becoming. It moves in the

 

movement of forces. It takes different forms. Pleasure is its positive form. Pain is its negative form. This delight is subconscient in Matter. Above this same delight is the Superconscient. This delight seeks to emerge through Mind, Life and Matter. The movement of the force increases in self-consciousness. There this delight seeks to realise itself. Its first appearance is dual and impure. It moves between two opposite poles of pleasure and pain. Its aim is purity, self-revelation, supreme delight of being. Such a delight is self-existent. It is also independent of objects and causes. Sachchidananda moves from the universal existence to individual life. The consciousness exceeds the form. It moves towards the form of the body and mind. As it moves thus, so the universal, objectless, self-existent delight tries to express through objects and particular experiences. We do not see what is behind, but we see the object in front. Therefore, we seek that object for our passing pleasures and satisfaction. We are free, we possess the self; we shall not seek but we shall possess them. These objects reflect the delight. They are not the causes of delight. That delight exists eternally.

The human being is egoistic. He is emerging from a dim shell of matter. To him the delight of existence is neutral. It is semi-latent. It is still in the shadow of the subconscious. It is a concealed soil of plenty. It is covered with a luxuriant growth of weeds. They put up poisonous flowers. Pain and pleasure are those flowers. They are the result of our egoistic existence. The Divine Consciousness is working secretly in us. It can devour these growths of desire. The Rig Veda says the God has burnt this growth which is the shoot of the earth. It is all concealed at the roots of pain and pleasure. They are its causes and secret being. Its sap of delight is in them. It will all emerge in new forms. It will not be desire. It will be self-existent satisfaction. Ours is mortal pleasure. The Divine has immortal ecstasy. That will replace the human response. This transformation is possible. Sensation and emotion are the outgrowths. In their essential being they are the delight of existence. Our pain is delight in its origin. Our pleasure is delight. They seek to express the delight, but fail. They fail because of division, ignorance and egoism.

******



book | by Dr. Radut